Attitude (psychology) facts for kids

This page is about the psychological construct. For other uses of attitude, see Attitude.

Two children at a playground talking and demonstrating a positive attitude.

In psychology, your attitude is how you think and feel about something. It's like your personal view or mindset. Your attitude affects how you act and what you do. It's something you learn and develop throughout your life.

Think of attitudes as the feelings you have about yourself and the world around you. A famous psychologist named Gordon Allport called attitude "the most important idea" in understanding how people act in groups. Your attitudes come from your past and present experiences. When we study attitudes, we look at how strong they are, how they can change, and how they affect what people buy or how they behave.

What is an Attitude?

In social psychology, an attitude is how you judge something. This judgment can be very negative or very positive. Your attitude can be something you know about (conscious) or something you don't even realize you have (unconscious).

Sometimes, people can have mixed feelings about the same thing. This is called being ambivalent. For example, you might like ice cream (positive) but also know it's not super healthy (negative). This shows that you can have different feelings about one thing at the same time.

Attitudes are also a set of feelings or beliefs about a person, place, or event. They can be very different from one person to another. Some researchers even think that some attitudes might be passed down from our parents through our genes!

When you say, "I love playing video games," or "I don't like spiders," you are showing your attitude. This shows if you feel positive or negative about something. Attitudes are a big part of how we see ourselves and how we act. They can really change how a person behaves.

An attitude can be a good or bad way of looking at people, things, events, activities, and ideas. It can be about something real or something abstract, like a concept.

If you have a positive attitude, you tend to see the good in situations. You understand that you can't change the past, but you can change what happens next. People with positive attitudes focus on the good things, not the bad.

Someone with a negative attitude is more likely to react badly to situations. They often get stuck on problems and find it hard to move forward. They might struggle to see the good in things and focus on the bad parts of people or events.

Attitudes can also affect what you pay attention to and how you understand new information. Strong attitudes, which are easy to access and based on lots of knowledge, have a bigger impact. They can guide your thoughts and actions, even when you are doing other things.

Jung's Idea of Attitude

Carl Jung, another important psychologist, had his own definition of attitude. He said attitude is how ready your mind is to act or react in a certain way. He believed attitudes often come in pairs, like one you know about and one you don't.

Jung also talked about two main attitude types: introversion and extroversion.

Introversion and Extroversion

Carl Jung thought there were two main types of attitudes: introversion and extroversion.

Introverts tend to focus their energy inward. They often enjoy quiet time alone and thinking deeply.
Extroverts feel more comfortable focusing their energy outward. They usually get their energy from other people and enjoy interacting a lot with the world.

What Shapes Our Attitudes?

Many things influence a person's attitude. These include:

Ideas and beliefs: What you think is true about the world.
Values: The important principles or goals that guide your life.
Perception: How you see and understand things.

Let's look at some other factors:

Social factors: How people expect you to act in different social situations.
Family: Your family has a huge impact on whether you develop a positive or negative attitude. These early attitudes can be hard to change.
Direct instruction: When someone tells you something is good or bad. For example, being told a dangerous animal is bad and to run away.
Prejudices: These are attitudes or opinions you form without knowing all the facts. They can be about objects, people, or anything else.
Media: Radio, TV, and social media play a big role in shaping what people believe and think.
Religious and educational institutions: Schools and religious groups strongly influence attitudes by teaching understanding and moral ideas.
Physical factors: Your health can affect your attitude. Things like not eating well, getting sick, or having accidents can mess with your normal development.
Economic factors and jobs: Your financial situation and job can influence your attitudes toward things like unions or certain laws.

Sometimes, people hold beliefs that are not true, even when there's a lot of evidence against them. These beliefs can be very hard to change. Another important factor is how we interact with symbols and ideas that have strong feelings attached to them. This can lead us to only see what we want to see.

How Attitudes Are Built

Attitudes are often made up of three parts:

Cognitive component: This is about your beliefs, thoughts, and what you know about something. For example, believing that snakes are dangerous.
Affective component: This refers to your feelings or emotions linked to something. For example, feeling scared of spiders.
Behavioral component: This is about how you act or what you do because of your attitude. For example, if you see a bear while hiking, you might scream and try to avoid it.

Even though there's some debate about how attitudes are structured, it's clear they are more than just positive or negative feelings. For example, how people feel about money can show their love for it, how they manage it, and what they think about it. These three parts (Cognitive, Affective, Behavioral) help us understand how attitudes work.

The ABC Model

A popular way to understand attitudes is the ABC model, which says attitudes have:

Affective (feelings) component: Your emotions linked to an attitude object. If you are scared of spiders, you will likely have a negative attitude toward them.
Behavioral (actions) component: How your attitude influences what you do.
Cognitive (thoughts) component: Your beliefs and thoughts about an object. If you think something has many negative qualities, you might act negatively toward it.

The MODE Model

The MODE model, created by Russell Fazio, helps explain when attitudes will lead to actions. It stands for Motivation and Opportunity as Determinants.

If you are motivated to think about your attitude and have the opportunity to do so, your behavior will be planned and thought out.
If you lack motivation or opportunity, your behavior might be more spontaneous.

Your attitudes can be measured in two ways:

Explicit measures: These are attitudes you are aware of and can easily tell others about. For example, filling out a survey.
Implicit measures: These are attitudes you might not even know you have. They are formed automatically. Implicit attitudes are more likely to affect your behavior when you are stressed or distracted.

Why Do We Have Attitudes?

Attitudes serve different purposes for people. Researchers have tried to understand why we hold certain attitudes by looking at how they help us. Daniel Katz suggested that attitudes can serve four main functions:

Utilitarian: Helps us get rewards and avoid punishment.
Knowledge: Helps us understand and make sense of the world.
Ego-defensive: Protects our self-esteem.
Value-expressive: Helps us show who we are and what we believe in.

Utilitarian Function

People adopt attitudes that benefit them and help them avoid bad things. If an attitude helps you in your own interest, it's serving a utilitarian function. For example, if you own a house and think "property tax increases are bad," that attitude helps you avoid paying more money.

Knowledge Function

Attitudes help us organize and understand new information. They help things fit together and make sense in our minds. This gives us a sense of stability and meaning in how we see the world. For example:

You believe you are a good person.
You believe good things happen to good people.
Something bad happens to your friend Bob.
So, you might think Bob must not be a good person (to make sense of the situation).

Ego-Defensive Function

This function is about protecting yourself from psychological harm. People use defense mechanisms, like denying something or making excuses, to protect their self-esteem. For example, if you are feeling bad about yourself, you might put down someone else who is less fortunate to feel better. This is more likely to happen when you are frustrated or something bad happens to you.

Value-Expressive Function

This function helps us show our core values and beliefs. It helps us define who we are and what we stand for. For example, your attitudes toward a political issue might show what you believe is important in society.

How Attitudes Are Formed

Most of our attitudes are learned through our experiences. The study of attitude formation looks at how people develop their evaluations of people, places, or things. Theories like classical conditioning (learning by association) and social learning (learning by watching others) are key to how attitudes are formed.

Unlike your personality, attitudes are expected to change as you gain more experience. Just being exposed to something repeatedly can also affect your attitude. This is called the mere-exposure effect. For example, if you see a new product many times, you might start to have a more positive attitude toward it, even if you don't know much about it.

Some researchers believe that genetics might indirectly affect attitudes. Also, theories like cognitive dissonance explain that if your beliefs and actions don't match, you might change one to fit the other. For example, if you believe smoking is bad but you smoke, you might change your belief to "it's not that bad" to reduce the discomfort.

How Attitudes Can Change

Attitudes can be changed through persuasion, which is trying to convince someone. Research looks at what makes a message persuasive:

Who receives the message: Some people are harder to persuade than others. For example, very intelligent people might not be easily convinced by one-sided messages. Your mood also plays a role.
Who sends the message: The person or source sending the message matters. If you think the source is an expert or trustworthy, you might be more easily persuaded. For example, a health report from a medical journal is more convincing than one from a gossip newspaper.
The message itself: How the message is presented can change attitudes. Sometimes, showing both sides of an argument can be helpful. If people aren't very interested in the message, simply having more arguments might make it more persuasive.
How the message is processed: A message can change an attitude by appealing to your thoughts.

* The central route means you think carefully about the information and decide to change your attitude based on the facts. * The peripheral route means you are influenced by things like how attractive the person delivering the message is, rather than the actual content. This is often seen in ads with celebrities.

Emotions and Attitude Change

Emotions are a big part of persuasion and changing attitudes. Emotions work together with your thoughts about an issue. You often see emotional appeals in ads, health campaigns, and political messages. For example, anti-smoking campaigns often use fear.

By triggering an emotion, it might be possible to change an attitude. The more confident you are in your attitude, the more you believe others should share it. Our attitudes greatly affect how we behave and how we treat others.

Predicting how you will feel about something in the future, called affective forecasting, also affects attitude change. How you expect to feel about an outcome can be more important than just logical reasons.

Researchers study how emotions affect attitudes by looking at things like facial expressions, voice changes, and heart rate.

Parts of Emotional Appeals

Any emotion can be used to persuade, like jealousy, disgust, or fear. Fear is one of the most studied emotions in persuasion.

However, if a fear appeal is too strong, it can backfire. People might reject the message or the source, and their attitude won't change. There's a "sweet spot" for emotion that motivates attitude change. If there's not enough emotion, attitudes won't change. If there's too much, people can get overwhelmed and do nothing.

Positive emotions like humor can also be used. Humor might work by creating funny or unexpected situations in your mind.

Important things that influence how emotional appeals work include:

Self-efficacy: Your belief in your own ability to handle a situation. If you don't think you can do anything about global warming, a scary message about it might not change your attitude.
Attitude accessibility: How easily you can remember and use an attitude.
Issue involvement: How important or relevant an issue is to you.

The features of a message, like the sender's body language or the content, can also affect how much emotion a fear appeal creates. One message might cause different levels of emotion for different people. So, one size doesn't fit all for emotional appeals.

Attitudes that are easy to access are usually harder to change.

How Attitudes Affect Behavior

Psychologists are very interested in how attitudes lead to behaviors. Two main theories help explain this: the theory of reasoned action and the theory of planned behaviour. Both theories suggest that attitudes influence behavior in a thoughtful and controlled way.

Theory of Reasoned Action

The theory of reasoned action (TRA) helps predict what people intend to do, which then predicts their behavior. It was developed by Martin Fishbein and Icek Ajzen. This theory came about because earlier research often found only a weak link between attitudes and actions.

Theory of Planned Behavior

The theory of planned behavior says that behaviors are mainly influenced by attitudes and other intentions. Icek Ajzen proposed this theory in 1985. It builds on the theory of reasoned action.

According to the theory of reasoned action, if people think a behavior is good (attitude) and believe important people in their lives want them to do it (subjective norm), they will have a stronger intention to do it. This often leads to actually doing the behavior.

The theory of planned behavior adds a new part: "perceived behavioral control." This means how much control you feel you have over doing the behavior. For example, you might intend to recycle (positive attitude), and your friends might encourage it (subjective norm), but if there are no recycling bins nearby (low perceived control), you might not actually recycle. This helps explain behaviors that you don't have complete control over.

Motivation and Opportunity as Determinants (MODE)

Russell H. Fazio suggested another theory called MODE. He believes that for attitudes to lead to planned behavior, people need to be motivated to think about their attitudes and have the opportunity to do so. If an attitude is automatically triggered, you need to be motivated to avoid making a wrong judgment and have the chance to think about your attitude and behavior.

Sometimes, even if you intend to do something, you might not actually do it because of things outside your control. The theory of planned behavior helps explain this by adding the idea of perceived behavioral control.

How We Measure Attitudes

In 1928, Louis Leon Thurstone wrote that "Attitudes Can Be Measured." He suggested a way to figure out people's views on social issues. Attitudes are hard to measure directly because they are ideas in our minds that we can't see.

However, many tests and scales are used to measure attitudes.

A Likert scale asks how much you agree or disagree with statements.
The Guttman scale looks at items that get harder to agree with.
The semantic differential uses opposite words (like good-bad) to measure the meaning you connect to something.

There are also indirect ways to measure attitudes, like observing behavior, looking at physical signs (like facial expressions), and using brain scans.

Attitudes can be either explicit (you know you have them) or implicit (you are not aware of them). Research on implicit attitudes shows that they exist, perhaps alongside explicit attitudes about the same thing. Both types of attitudes seem to affect behavior, but in different ways. The connection between them is still being studied.

Explicit Measures

Explicit measures usually rely on what people say about themselves or behaviors that are easy to see. These often use scales with opposite choices (like good-bad, support-oppose). Explicit attitudes are what you consciously form based on recent information. Once formed, these attitudes are usually strong and don't change easily across different situations or over time. Likert scales and other self-report surveys are commonly used.

Implicit Measures

Implicit measures are not controlled by your conscious mind and are thought to be automatic. This might make them more accurate than explicit measures. For example, people might want to appear to have certain attitudes to fit in socially. Someone might have hidden prejudicial attitudes but say they have no prejudice. Implicit measures help us understand these situations and look at attitudes a person might not even know they have or doesn't want to show.

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is an example of an implicit measure. It looks at how quickly you can link concepts together. For example, if you are quicker to link "good" words with "flowers" than with "insects," it might suggest an implicit positive attitude toward flowers. People are often unwilling to give answers that are seen as socially unacceptable. They might report what they think their attitudes should be, rather than what they truly are. Even more complicated, people might not even be aware that they hold biased attitudes. Scientists have developed new ways to find these unconscious biases.